


Persistence of Memory

by tormalyne



Category: Granblue Fantasy (Video Game)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Post-WMTSB2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-06
Updated: 2018-08-06
Packaged: 2019-06-23 00:34:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15594324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tormalyne/pseuds/tormalyne
Summary: Once the skies have settled, Sandalphon returns to Canaan to tie up a loose end. He finds Canaan not as empty as he expects.Dust stirs at the passage of his feet, drifting in swirling eddies. Grime stretches fingers up the walls and burrows into corners, as though in the scant weeks of Lucifer’s absence, years have passed. And yet – the silence dwells too deep, playing tricks. He hears an echo, another scuffling set of footsteps following his. As he passes an open doorway, a dropcloth flickers, stirring without a breeze.





	Persistence of Memory

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [Crosswinds: a Granblue Fantasy Tarot Zine](https://twitter.com/gbf_tarot). An amazing project that I'm super proud to have been a part of. Take a look for more fantastic fic and art!
> 
> This is a modified version of the story included in the Crosswinds book.
> 
> Huge thanks to [caramelize](https://archiveofourown.org/users/caramelize), who I couldn't have written this fic without.

In the end, Sandalphon returns to Canaan alone.

He leaves the singularity and the girl in blue aboard their airship, hovering in poison clouds and harrowing winds. Their feet had trespassed once, but not again; this is no place for mortals, even ones such as them, and Sandalphon won’t permit a second intrusion. Not here, among the looming stones that once bore such splendor, the seat of power for the Astrals who’d shaped the very foundations of the sky itself.

Not here, in the halls where Lucifer had once walked. Where Lucifer had once lived.

The halls where Lucifer had died. 

No. There’s nothing here for anyone but him, one last errand waiting before he closes the doors of Canaan forever to mortal and primal beast alike.

As he walks, his footsteps echo, ringing in sepulcher silence. Without Lucifer’s brilliant presence, Canaan is engulfed in stygian gloom. Grey presses in from all sides, the air heavy and stagnant, leeched of color. Sandalphon draws his wings nearer around himself, and even the rich brown of his own feathers seems faded.

Dust stirs at the passage of his feet, drifting in swirling eddies. Grime stretches fingers up the walls and burrows into corners, as though in the scant weeks of Lucifer’s absence, years have passed, the whole complex moldering. Never has Sandalphon felt so utterly alone as he does now traversing Canaan’s empty, glowering expanse; even in the cradle, endlessly brewing coffee, he’d at least known that Lucifer waited outside that hourglass world.

And yet – the silence dwells too deep, playing tricks. He hears an echo, another scuffling set of footsteps following his. As he passes an open doorway, a pale sheet flickers, stirring without a breeze – a drop cloth over furniture in an empty room. One of the research labs, untouched since the Astral – Lucilius – had been dealt with, slain by Lucifer’s own hand.

(Dealt with. Their own creator, cut down. It seems unthinkable. Just how much of Lucifer had he not understood?)

It had been a lab like this where Sandalphon had first woken. Almost exactly like it, pristine white walls, high ceiling, furnishings arranged in utilitarian rows, and there, etched into the floor, a now-dead array where he would stand for examination. The phantom tug of that hated duty has Sandalphon’s feet moving on their own; he finds himself stepping through the doorway and into memory:

His first impression of the world had been a vast, gentle blue. Cool liquid had dripped from his body, draining from the dimensional cradle that had held him, matting his wings. He knew nothing, yet understood all, for he was a primal beast, an archangel, built for a purpose and waiting to be filled with that singular duty.

In full armor, gleaming swords at his side, six bright wings folded at his back, Lucifer had waited in the cracked shell of his cradle to greet Sandalphon.

Naked, defenseless, the frigid air of the lab drying him, he had stood before Lucifer and had felt no fear in the newness of his existence. Lucifer’s hand against his cheek, Lucifer’s downy wings wrapping around him, had been so warm; Lucifer’s blue, blue eyes gazing into his, eclipsing the blinding white of the lab, had been warmer still.

Lucilius’s eyes, watching, evaluating, calculating, had been the same vast blue as Lucifer’s, but when Sandalphon had met his gaze, he remembered only the cold of the lab coming rushing back, chilling him through.

But that was the past, and Sandalphon tears himself from it – with effort, the memory thick around him, clinging in sticky threads. He heaves for breath, bracing himself against the doorframe for leverage to shove himself back, out of the room. This isn’t the same lab. Similar, but not the same.

Still, he shivers as he turns away and forces his breathing to even. He can’t banish the sensation of eyes on the back of his neck, that cold, calculating gaze watching.

—

He is alone in Canaan, and yet Canaan is not empty. The hall he walks stretches too long. He can sense something now, distantly. Little threads adhere to his limbs with every step, spiderwebs tangling around his arms, his legs, even his wings; his skin crawls.

Sunlight slants in through an archway where a moment ago there was only featureless wall. Sandalphon stops short, his footfall heavy, as a loamy scent fills the hall. Vines creep over stonework and springy grass spreads a carpet over the floor beneath his feet – a garden growing around him.

Their garden, cool and fragrant, great green leaves shading it from the ether’s glare. A sanctum for only the two of them, lush with flowers seeded from every corner of the sky, and peeking through the treetops, a glimpse of achingly clear blue. Even now Sandalphon can see the table and its matched set of chairs at the garden’s center, empty and waiting as they’d been day after day. But no – he blinks and realizes the table holds a familiar pair of delicate china cups and a pitcher of coffee, steaming its deceptively sweet scent into the evening breeze. 

The first time Sandalphon had tasted that bitter brew, he’d carried the acrid flavor on his tongue long after Lucifer had returned to his duties, long after Sandalphon had returned to the lab. He’d tasted it as he was examined, closed his eyes and focused on it while his wings were bent almost to breaking and pain lanced up his back. He’d tried to recall the bitterness long after it faded and there was only the copper tang of blood in his mouth, clinging to it as he bore the time until the experiment was over and the hurt had finally ceased.

The next day, when Lucifer had returned with another bitter cup of coffee for him to drink, Sandalphon had smiled, eager for another taste.

But the garden is lost now, nothing more than a ruin if it still exists at all, the same as those idyllic days Sandalphon had spent in it. Sandalphon turns from the archway and mantles his wings to shed a fresh layer of sticky webbing. He forces his feet to move away along the empty hall. The bitterness in his mouth is nothing more than a memory.

As he turns a corner, the too-long hallway finally giving way, a shadow falls into step beside him. One of the lesser angels, her form obscured and insubstantial, and yet Sandalphon can still recognized the ugly twist of her mouth, the jealousy writ across her face.

He remembers; she had whispered, when Lucifer couldn’t hear. 

_The Supreme Primarch pays him too much mind. Why does he give a purposeless irregularity so much of his time?_

(She had been far from the only one.)

She’d vanished days later; many angels of her cohort had disappeared, and the lab technicians had murmured of a wrongness among their ranks, a defect, _falling_ – soon, Lucilius’s experiments with angel cores had begun.

Beside him, the shadow’s contemptuous mouth shapes his name. Whispers rise up with her voice, rushing into a cacophony, a tempest swirling around him, deafening as sticky threads thicken, winding tighter and tighter, ensnaring his limbs. They crawl over his body, weaving into the beginnings of a cocoon, stretching up his neck, over his chin, his mouth, his nose, his ears, his eyes—

The whispers cry, beg, scream, wail. Thousands of voices in agony, hatred, rage, despair. The remnants of Canaan’s many, many ill-fated dead, roused – by a kindred spirit, something alike within him, vicious and angry, calling to them. Calling them from slumber, his power feeding them.

Finally, he understands. A sickly, horrible remnant, sprouted from a cursed seed, nurtured by fear and bile and resentment until it’d crept into Canaan’s foundations like an infection and spread. It had lain dormant, perhaps sealed by Lucifer’s pure power. But Sandalphon’s hands are stained, and he had come to Canaan and woken it. Sandalphon struggles, thrashing against its tendrils, fighting as they drag him down—

Beyond the jangling, strident chorus, so faintly he can barely hear it, a familiar voice calls out:

 _Sandalphon_. 

But that’s impossible. A sharp shudder of rejection runs through him. That voice can’t be calling to him. That voice is forever silenced. He will never hear that voice again.

Still, the shock of thinking, even for a moment, that Lucifer might— With a shouted, furious surge of power, Sandalphon snaps his wings out and wrenches himself free of the clutching threads.

The whispers die away. The webs of memory shrivel, turn brittle where they cling, crack and fall to dust as Sandalphon shoves through them.

Finally, Sandalphon steps into the room at Canaan’s heart.

—

The shattered remains of his cradle crunch beneath Sandalphon’s feet.

There should be something more here.

There should be something momentous, a great, thundering remnant of power, an indelible scar on the universe – something, anything, to mark where Lucifer fell. Yet there’s only a dried trail of blood, cold stone, the pearlescent shards of the world where Sandalphon had grown coffee, brewed a single perfect cup over and over – all exactly as Sandalphon had left it, undisturbed.

Forgotten.

The basin holding the broken eggshells of the cradle still glows, dim incandescence washing the room in silvery light. A pale relic of that small, insignificant world where he’d waited for Lucifer to come for him. Waited, to understand his punishment. Waited, to hear Lucifer call his name.

Yet that world had held nothing for him. In that world, Lucifer had never said even a single word.

That world had been a single moment in time, never ending, never moving forward. Stagnation. Unchanging, so long as Sandalphon never changed – never chose to change. Was that what Lucifer had wished him to understand?

Lucifer isn’t here to answer. Not even the faintest trace of Lucifer’s power remains save for the spent wings on Sandalphon’s back; now that he’s here, able to feel it for himself, Sandalphon is certain.

He sets to work. It won’t do to linger in this dead place overly long. 

Painstakingly, he gathers up the cradle’s shards, every gleaming sliver, every pearly fragment, every glittering bit of dust ground into the paving stones. By the time he finishes, his nails are torn, his knees ache, and his vision swims. But he has them all, every component element of that world Lucifer created for him, every feathery tuft softly shining in the gloom even after its maker has gone.

Sandalphon stares at the glowing pile, the last of Lucifer’s workings. He reaches a hand out towards it, lets his fingertips brush against the downy edge of one luminous plume. Perhaps— but still there’s nothing, not even the faintest sense of Lucifer lingering.

He closes his fingers into a fist, grasping.

Of course there’s nothing. He’d been the one to break the cradle open. He’d been the one to tear himself free of that world of endless days. Lucifer had made sure his own presence wasn’t needed at all.

With a rictus smile, Sandalphon twists his hand and sets the remnants of the cradle aflame.

“I told you, didn’t I?” he says softly, into the quiet of Lucifer’s empty grave. “I’d make the world that doesn’t need me burn.” 

The flames of the cradle reach higher and higher, burning with a cold, blue-white tinge, until they lick at the gaping holes in the domed ceiling. Sandalphon feeds power into them, lets them rage, unseen by any other eyes but his. 

Fitting, Sandalphon thinks, tilting his head back to look over the snapping tips of the flames, through the ruined ceiling at the clear night sky beyond. Unseen, alone, just as Lucifer had been here for centuries watching, with all the world unknowing. 

The sky looks so empty even filled with the dazzling pinprick lights of a thousand stars.

For a moment – for just one moment – Sandalphon allows himself to wish. An impossible wish, a wish that can never come true, pointlessly futile, and yet still he wishes it, desperately yearning—

“Lucifer... I also want to share one more cup of coffee with you.”

His words echo dully, swallowed up by the sky's vast emptiness, Canaan's dead silence.

Impossible. And yet he wishes it anyway, over the stardust of the promise he’d made, Lucifer's last words that he can answer only now, with no one to hear them. Too late, but worse would be never to answer them at all.

These words he leaves, flowers at Lucifer’s grave. This is the last time Sandalphon will come here, he knows with sudden certainty. The only grave visit he’ll make.

Slowly, Sandalphon lowers his hand. The flames burn bright and strong, and will continue to burn as long as his power lasts. At least something stands now to mark Lucifer’s presence. Something proves Lucifer’s existence in more than just memory.

He turns from the pyre and steadily retraces his steps through Canaan’s desolate halls. No web of memories rises to trap him. He doesn’t look back. There’s nothing for him there, no ghosts he cares to hold to, and he has a promise to keep. The living await him beyond the stillness of Canaan’s walls.

As he steps out into biting winds, he hears a shout – the girl in blue, leaning precariously over the Grancypher’s railing, the singularity, both waving so vigorously that they’re liable to go tipping right over the ship’s patched side, and the red dragon hovering above them.

The sight hits like sunlight against Sandalphon’s face, a ripple of warmth to Canaan’s bleakness against his back. The vibrancy of the Grancypher, its varnished deck, sails snapping in the wind, the blue of the girl’s hair, all gleam stingingly bright after the colorless world he’s just left. A dream that he’s waking from, the last clinging webs burnt away by the brilliance of their smiles, the future waiting for him in the palm of these mortals’ hands.

“Sandalphon! Sandalphoooon! Welcome back!” the girl calls, and in her enthusiasm, does go tipping over the rail. The singularity has to cease his waving to haul her back aboard, laughing all the while. Sandalphon finds his steps hurrying toward them; the fools, they won’t cease this nonsense until he’s back aboard.

Behind him, his impossible wish remains: a single shining star, unseen but ever-burning.

**Author's Note:**

>  **The Devil** is selfish and violent. It represents anger, jealousy, resentment, and self-delusion. Reversed, it is detachment, breaking free, and power reclaimed.
> 
> I'm at @twocrowned on twitter if you want to come chat. Thank you for reading!


End file.
